Social Media and our Social Skills

Several months I embarked on an experiment to take one of my Facebook accounts and liberally accept “Friends” to see what would happen. As of this writing this particular account has just under 4,000 Friends and the laboratory has yielded somewhat disconcerting results.

Many people place profiles that are not real and that many “women” and “men” are actually trying to scam people out of money through the old Nigerian con game to offer a large inheritance settlement to someone with the same last name as the person being conned (or some other variation with the end game to convince the person being conned to wire a sum of money to secure the inheritance settlement).

The rampant use of Itunes cards as some sort of currency in the third world (and poorer people here in the U.S.) is also unsettling given that Itunes cards can only be used to purchase Itunes stores items like apps, movies, music, books etc. Perhaps Itunes cards are becoming some sort of black market currency in third world countries? What is also glaring in its dysfunctionality is the great number of people with no possibility of becoming gainfully employed without resorting to unscrupulous means of obtaining currency to subsist.

With all the real wealth being horribly inequitable in its distribution, the notion of either Universal Income, or in the case of conservative belief, Universal Jobs seems so logical yet so illusive given the obsession that many power possessors insist that the market should determine how resources are allocated. The market often fails miserably when economic-political-psychological and sociological considerations are incorporated. In our book, A Call to Action: How to Save Millions of Lives we have come up with an acronym we call EPPS to describe and convey the importance of these considerations in making our world society more sustainable and resilient.

What really bothers me is that perhaps our social skills are actually declining; our use of language is certainly deteriorating — of that, I am sure. R U replacing are you? seems a step in the wrong direction. LMAO and some of the other acronyms are more interesting but perhaps truncating full blown expressions reduces some of the original intent of a particular statement.

Now we all have to learn that communication is almost always preferable to anger, retreating or simply silence when confronted with situations with relatively poor chances for positive resolution. For the life of me, I am still unclear how much monetization of the internet really goes on and who actually benefits financially from the internet. My sense is that the tech business model is to establish large market share in terms of numbers of users or members even at the expense of profitability until the Founders/Investors are able to cash out of their investments and/or have become super wealthy through the non profitable to profitable growth period. Along the way, programmers, ad sales and other social media support staff are getting better than average salaries to do their part in providing content, advertising and general social media avenues for us masses. It does appear that companies like Google, Amazon, Oracle, Apple and Microsoft, among many others, are highly profitable and that their business models make real money, in addition to their large numbers of members or subscribers.

My question to you is straightforward — Do you think providing a better than subsistence lifestyle for the bottom 50% of our world population (some 3.75 billion people as of this writing) would lessen things like international terrorism and other malfunctions of our world society. The alternative is continued spending on wars that benefit the governmental sector but not necessarily the general populace. In many ways, wars are very damaging psychically to the general populace, indeed.

Getting back to why I wrote this blog entry in the first place, I feel the amount of scamming, lying and cheating that goes on between many “Friends” is indicative of a society that has lost much of its moral fiber and ability to truly communicate with each other. Hence, having completed a Call to Action, we have started the long and arduous process of starting to build these sustainable and resilient communities that will ideally have true human communication built into the fabric of the community’s infrastructure. http://amzn.to/2nvl2v8. It is interesting that Europe is much further ahead of the U.S. and Asia in these disciplines of sustainability and resilience and very responsive to the ideas put forth in A Call to Action.

The brand we are currently building is tentatively entitled CLEAR SPRINGS COMMUNITIES — to convey a sense of an environmentally friendly healthy community to live in. But fun too ! This concept is currently being evaluated for an 11,000 acre parcel of land located in central Georgia that we are tentatively calling New Atlanta. One of the most important components of this proposed community is to incorporate mobility as a means to stimulate real human communication rather than the somewhat less direct means of communicating through social media. Though social media appears to be here to stay with us we also need face-to-face in person interactions to truly receive impressions of reality. This may be one of the main drawbacks of social media in its current incarnation. Even when “facetiming” or video calling, the actual face to face communication has been digitized and something is lost in the proverbial translation.

Our next blog post will discuss the financial aspects of starting up the CLEAR SPRINGS COMMUNITIES BRAND.

Hope you are enjoying your summer (or winter) depending upon whether you are on this glorious planet we call Earth. Please feel free to use social media to expand our concepts any way you can. We hope to communicate with you soon.